Corruption in ACORN

CORRUPTION IN ACORN

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes. Mr. BURTON of Indiana. You know, Mr. Speaker, one of the things that concerns me is that the more liberal media seems to ignore some of the things that are extremely important to the people of this country and to the freedoms we enjoy and the money that's being spent by the Congress. This weekend and today I watched a number of these shows that I watch on a regular basis because those of us in this body, we follow the news very, very closely. Mr. Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Mr. O'Reilly, who are all on FOX, focused attention over the past few weeks on this ACORN organization. It's really interesting to find out that ACORN, which helped the President get elected, was such a strong force for him and whom he congratulated on the support they gave him, and he told them he wanted to work with them and he wanted to have their advice on issues of major concern. So he's very close to ACORN. ACORN, which received $53 million from 1993 until now--that's 16 years. They received $53 million over 16 years. This year, they now have access to $8.5 billion. Now, I mean, that's a heck of a reward, it seems like to me, for being supportive of the administration. Then Mr. Frank, on the Banking Committee, puts legislation through, which has passed the House, that would give them access to an additional $1.5 billion. That's $10 billion ACORN has access to. If you were watching any of these television shows in the last week, you'll see that some people went in and they posed as a prostitute and a man who was soliciting for a prostitute. I think they call him a pimp. They asked the advice of ACORN, and ACORN gave them advice on how to circumvent the law, how to hide what they were doing from the law, how they could make money and not report it to the Government of the United States. Then these people asked, Well, we want to bring some young people in from South America. They're underage, and we want them to work for us in this prostitution ring. The people at ACORN said--and there were two or three of them--they said, Well, here's how you do it. And they explained to them how they could claim them as children or dependents and expand their ring of prostitution. This is all documented. It's on television, and it's in the papers--some papers, very few. Yet ACORN is going to get almost $10 billion. They have been involved in other nefarious activities, and they were supposed to work on the Census. Can you imagine? The way the States get money from the Federal Government is based, in large part, on the Census that's taken--how many people live in a congressional district, how many people live in a State--and the money that comes from the Federal Government is divvied up, in large part, on the basis of the Census. So ACORN was going to have a major role in working to count the number of people throughout the country and, in effect, decide where this money is going to be going. This is an organization that has a tremendous amount of corruption. They're finding more and more corruption every single day, and the taxpayers of this country are allowing them, through the Congress, to have access to almost $10 billion of our taxpayers' dollars. That is insane. We've asked the Congress and leaders of the Democrat Party, the chairmen of these various committees, to hold hearings on this, to have an investigation, and we have yet to have any investigation whatsoever, not one. So today I wrote a letter to Chairman Towns of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, who is a very good friend of mine and a very fair man. I have asked Chairman Towns to have an investigation into ACORN. When you're talking about $10 billion of the taxpayers' money going to an organization that we know has been involved in various nefarious activities and that we know has been involved in corruption, we certainly should at least look into what they're doing and stop them from using taxpayers' dollars to do these things. This is something that we shouldn't allow anybody to shovel under the rug. The administration should take responsibility for conducting an investigation and pushing for it, and the Members of Congress on the majority side that has the chairmanships in both the House and the Senate need to push very hard for an investigation, and we need to do it now. We need not to give them one dime until that investigation is completed.

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